- 'Tis known the yam will ne’er to bigness swell;
- And from each mould the vegetable tribes,
- However frugal, nutriment derive: [240]
- Yet may their sheltering vines, their dropping leaves,
- Their roots dividing the tenacious glebe,
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More than refund the sustenance they draw.
- WHETHER the fattening compost, in each hole,
- 'Tis best to throw; or, on the surface spread; [245]
- Is undetermin’d: Trials must decide.
- Unless kind rains and fostering dews descend,
- To melt the compost’s fertilizing salts;
- A stinted plant, deceitful of thy hopes,
- Will from those beds slow spring where hot dung lies: [250]
- But, if ‘tis scatter’d generously o’er all,
- The Cane will better bear the solar blaze;
- Less rain demand; and, by repeated crops,
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Thy land improv’d, its gratitude will show.
- ENOUGH of composts, Muse; of soils, enough: [255]
- When best to dig, and when inhume the Cane;
- A task how arduous! next demands thy song.
a wholesome root, either boiled or roasted.1 They will sometimes weigh one and an half, or two pounds, but their commonest size is from six ounces to nine. They cannot be kept good above half a year. They are a native of South-America, the West-Indies, and of most parts of Guinea.2
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Roasting and boiling are two of the easiest ways to prepare yams and were thus two methods commonly employed by the enslaved. In the eighteenth-century Caribbean, enslaved persons also regularly prepared yams by following the long-established West African practice of pounding them with a mortar and pestle until they formed a paste that could be rolled into small balls. Pounded yams were sometimes known as fufu, a term derived from the Twi and Ga-Adangme languages that also applied to pounded plantain and cassava (Higman 78-81). ↩︎
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A region on the west coast of Africa that served as a center of the Atlantic slave trade. Although its precise borders are difficult to pinpoint, it ranged from Sierra Leone to Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. It should not be confused with the modern nation of Guinea. It is important to note that European names for African places and ethnicities were imprecise. Slave traders and planters often identified enslaved individuals by their ports of embarkation (for example, Minnah, Papaw, and Coromantin), even though Africans may have identified themselves by their villages or districts of origin instead. ↩︎